Richard:
> there is the notorious 3 consonant cluster in the
> presumably obsolescent verb /tilgref/ 'to telegraph' -
> but reportedly not in the process of verb conjugation
Me:
> Yes, but this is a foreign word obviously. It may need
> time yet to nativize into normal grammatical processes
> like English "strive" did.
Brian:
> Just out of curiosity, what do you consider normal here?
I say "strove" as the past tense of "strive" but I realize
that, without analogy, we'd expect no ablaut in a foreign
word that postdates the origin of this ablaut. This is
not the case however showing that new words can be sucked
into the vortex of a preexisting morphophonological
process as I was suggesting with some stems in IE being
absorbed into already existing ablaut. Jens appeared to
be rejecting the validity of this idea and then also my
skepticism on the age of the stem *wertmn.
Since I'm not completely versed in Modern Hebrew or Old
English, I can't say what is "normal" or "expected" within
the contexts of their grammars. I was merely speaking in
a historical sense when using "normal" -- that one would
think that, being that a word is foreign, it shouldn't
undergo the same processes as the preexisting, more native
words unless analogy with other words plays a part in it.
With "tilgref", we know the word is foreign. It doesn't
undergo native processes according to Richard yet but
this is expected for foreign words that haven't acquired
analogical changes yet. With "strive", the word was
succesfully nativized into English grammar -- hence
"strove".
This is all to prove my point that if we didn't know any
better, we might mistake some words as ancient simply
because they seem to use ancient rules. With "strive",
we'd probably think it were an IE root.
We'd be wrong, of course.
= gLeN